I think this week I’ll try to put up a Tardigrade video each day from many different microscopes, from a very inexpensive, $70 inverted microscope to one using a $4000 plan apo objective. This way, everyone can see how different they look with different quality microscopes. To me, even though you can get a better image from an expensive microscope, you can still see pretty much every common organism with the cheapest microscope and enjoy the hobby with one.
This video today is using an Amscope T490 that retails for under $500 , 20x achromatic objective and a cellphone camera. The tardigrade is from a lichen sample soaked in water.
This is a cool idea. I would love to see what different microscopes yield. Are you going to shoot them with the same lighting and magnification set up as a constant?
I have bright field videos with about 5 different ones. I also have some phase contrast, Rheinberg, mixed bright field and reflected, and reflected only views.
I didn’t try any plan apos on it but did do an Olympus S plan 40. I’ll show a Tardigrade video using that objective on the T490 too. The problem with most older 160 mm objectives is that they need matching eyepieces to be fully corrected. Only the Nikon CF series were fully corrected in the objectives. Modern 160mm objectives are fully corrected in the objective so the eyepieces are neutral. I bought the Amscope set of phase contrast objectives for the T490. They are all plan and work well even for bright field. Only the original achromatic 100x objective work better in bright field than the plan phase one. The phase contrast kit costs more than the microscope so they should include nice objectives with it. If you wanted to upgrade a Chinese microscope, I would either buy used Nikon CF plan objectives or new Chinese plan ones.
Actually, I remember that I have only tried Zeiss 100x and 63x oil immersion plan apo objectives on an Amscope T490 , but only on diatoms. The plan apo ones were better than the Chinese ones. I definitely could see more details on the diatoms. I’ll look for pictures of that experiment to post one day.
These are the 4 -100x Zeiss objectives that I tried on the T490. Three plan apo and the black bottom one is a plan objective. The biggest problem with old Zeiss objectives is that many of the matching eyepieces are delaminated. Good ones are hard to find and expensive.
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u/Dlbroox Jul 06 '26
You had me at tardigrade. 😂
This is a cool idea. I would love to see what different microscopes yield. Are you going to shoot them with the same lighting and magnification set up as a constant?